It struck me recently that as the quality of content on the internet has arguably gone to shit, in the form of increasingly frequent ads plastered everywhere, paywalls or superficial/dumb blog posts or mainstream media articles, the basic idea of a link aggregator platform can naturally lose its quality, or struggle to maintain a level of quality, and so lose its appeal.
I think I can see this on lemmy (which is my favourite fediverse platform) to some extent and have probably noticed it on somewhere like hackernews to an extent too. I see a link that has an interesting/important sounding title on an interesting/important topic, then click the link and see an article or web page that maybe is just not worth my time.
I’d be curious how many people upvote a link here without reading the cited article/page?
All of which is sad and speaks to general problems with media today, with AI garbage, of course, probably about to make it worse. But regarding the fediverse and lemmy, I think it maybe raises interesting questions.
Obviously the idea of a link aggregator is to seek out and share “the good stuff”. But maybe talking about where that generally comes from needs to be a more prominent and open question? Or maybe I need to subscribe to fewer news communities? More ambitiously though, maybe, at least over time, it will get more important or valuable to lean into the forum-like or even blog-like aspect of lemmy where it’s increasingly all about the “OC” here, especially as engaging with actual humans with actual personal thoughts gets more and more valuable over time? Could private, maybe even invite-only communities even be of value here?
Thoughts?
I really don’t like the format, but mastodon, for the most part from what I’ve seen (been there since Nov 2022), has a pretty talkative culture that is often criticised for being a bit too serious. Here’s an example of a post/thread I just pulled form my home feed (see here]. But it’s still microblogging and mastodon is a pretty brutalist platform and I’m not a huge fan of its dominance on the fediverse. Also, basing everything on following people gets pretty messy and annoying pretty quickly. Though the upshot is that you actually go get to know people, which is something lemmy lacks and could improve on (by allowing you to follow people too).
Compared to lemmy, the culture is, on average, less shitpost-y, bit more “serious”, less mainstream (tech and LGBTQ) but also fewer extremes politically (though that’s probably not true actually).
In the end, it actually shits me that the two platforms can’t interoperate better, as there isn’t any good reason other than the two platforms lacking appropriate features, with mastodon kinda being the more annoying culprit in that IMO.
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Yep you can follow tags pretty easily. I find tags pretty ambiguous though and many don’t use them frequently (including me). But they’re definitely easy and the best way to find people.